TMCnet Call Center Software Week in Review

Today wraps up ITEXPO (News - Alert), which took place this week at the Miami Convention Center and highlighted some of the best and brightest solutions and partnerships in the call center space. To wrap up the week’s call center software events, we’ll start with an announcement made during the show.

prairieFrye, a provider of contact center software solutions, has linked up with its longtime partner, Microsoft (News - Alert), to create an array of products like Gold Communications, Gold Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Silver Business Intelligence. The company’s most recent innovation, prairieFrye’s Contact Center for Microsoft Lync, was showcased at ITEXPO.

Microsoft Lync is a UC platform that allows users to see their contact’s availability, send instant messages, start or join audio, video or Web conferences, make phone calls and can even connect with Skype (News - Alert). prairieFrye’s Contact Center solution has been recognized by the company as being Lync Qualified and certified as Windows 8 Compatible.

In other call center software news, XACT Telesolutions, a source of call center software and services and order-taking solutions, has expanded its service capabilities to meet the needs of digital health maintenance industry. The new set of services includes full help desk services, call filtering, order entry, service and support dispatch, Internet and Web support, call answering and more.

Intelli-Touch Apps announced this week that it will become "instrumental" to the success of individual network marketers, ultimately affecting the industry in a meaningful way. The consumer version of ITA's (News - Alert) IVQ-Business Assistant provides personal network dealers with enhanced productivity and automated call screening and routing. The app also offers in-call recording and the ability to produce and distribute customer sales support videos.

Open Source CRM company, Zurmo, announced that those who participate in its Zurmo Early Adopter Program will get a hosted instance of Zurmo. Apart from this, participants will also get committed support and help from expert CRM consultants. The company is giving out all these goodies as it is looking for some real-world feedback on some new features it plans to introduce in near future.

Also this week, SalesPortal (News - Alert), a partnership marketing network for enterprises that uses contact centers as a strategic customer engagement channel, revealed some changes made to its executive team. The new team will aim at marketing services by large enterprise customers, thus deploying and supporting those solutions.

Finally, TMC addressed the concept of crowdsourcing when it comes to looking for outsourced services. More and more companies looking for people to do functions such as data entry and analysis, invoicing and fulfillment, customer service, expense reports, creative services, software development, data compilation and manipulation, are turning to using crowdsourcing from places such as Elance, CrowdFlower, Freelanceswitch and even Craigslist. But is it wise?

That’s all for this week in call center software news. Check back with us next week for another update.